When they cleaned out her cube, they found the expected detritus: old keyboard, a monitor with a broken power button, and a jar full of half-used pens. What they didn’t expect was the drawer full of skulls. Tiny skulls, from mice and little beaked skulls from baby birds, all piled like some imitation Parisian catacomb. Even more disturbing were her old notebooks, full of symbols twisting like rusty barbed wire; the covers were smeared with bloody fingerprints. The IT guy walked in towards the end of the clean out. He looked at it all: the keyboard, the skulls. Then he said, “So I guess we better change those network passwords pronto, eh?”

In preparation for this post I carved thirteen jack o’ lanterns, which are now placed in a concentric circle around me, burning bright with resinous candles. A black cat sits on my lap, and there’s a good chance my underpants drawer is haunted. But most importantly, none of what I just said is true, and I can only justify my lies with the six bottles of empty pumpkin ale that I placed near my computer. Happy Halloween!